Business Insider reports:

A top Uber exec said AI is not giving the company bang for its buck.

In a Rapid Response interview released on Saturday, Uber’s operations chief, Andrew Macdonald, said it was becoming harder to justify AI costs within the company.

He said that Uber CTO Praveen Neppalli Naga went viral after telling The Information in an April interview that Uber had already blown through its Claude Code budget for 2026.

The comment led to what he described as a “head-exploding moment,” sparking discussions about AI token consumption within the company and the trade-offs it creates, such as on head count.

He said that, based on talks with Uber’s senior engineering leaders, he realized higher token usage did not translate into a proportional increase in useful consumer features.

“That link is not there yet, right?” he said. “I think maybe implicitly there is more that is getting shipped, but it’s very hard to draw a line between one of those stats and, ‘Okay, now we’re actually producing 25% more useful consumer features.'”

He said that the trade-off costs from AI are harder to justify because he can’t draw a direct link. Earlier this month, CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said in an earnings call that Uber was slowing hiring to counter its investments in AI.

Macdonald added that AI can seem free if you’re “just a user sitting there coming up with interesting use cases” without paying for it. But ultimately, the company foots the bill.

While Big Tech is going hard on tokenmaxxing — using AI as much as possible — and evaluating employees by their AI usage, some companies are starting to go the other way. [Continue reading…]

In March, Kevin Roose reported:

An engineer at OpenAI processed 210 billion “tokens” — enough text to fill Wikipedia 33 times — through the company’s artificial intelligence models over the last week, the most of any employee.

At Anthropic, a single user of the company’s A.I. coding system, Claude Code, racked up a bill of more than $150,000 in a month.

And at tech companies like Meta and Shopify, managers have started to factor A.I. use into performance reviews, rewarding workers who make heavy use of A.I. tools and chastening those who don’t.

This is the new reality for coders, some of the first white-collar workers to feel the effects of A.I. as it sweeps through the economy. A.I. was supposed to help tech companies boost productivity and cut costs. But it has also created an expensive new status game, known as “tokenmaxxing,” among A.I.-obsessed workers who are desperate to prove how productive they are.

At some tech companies, including Meta and OpenAI, employees compete on internal leaderboards that show how many tokens — the atomic unit of A.I. use, roughly equivalent to a word fragment — each worker consumes, two people familiar with those companies’ practices said. Generous “token budgets” are becoming a job perk for coders, like dental insurance or free lunch, and some are spending thousands of dollars a month trying to automate as much of their own work as possible. [Continue reading…]